To Understand Censorship and Other Institutional Dysfunction, Look To ‘Adults These Days.’
According to innumerable media reports, ‘kids these days’ don’t properly understand or value free speech. Many attribute illiberal currents and identitarian blowups in many knowledge economy spaces to the arrival of Gen Z on college campuses and, later, the workplace.
It may, indeed, be the case that members of Gen Z tend to hold importantly different perspectives on risk, conflict and identity compared to previous cohorts. However, these differences are not the cause of the ‘Great Awokening’ and the struggles over status and power that have accompanied it. Instead, if we want to understand what happened to institutions of higher learning and other knowledge economy professions, we have to look to ‘adults these days.’
For instance, the radical shifts in media discourse, focusing intensely on identity-based discrimination and prejudice, began after 2011 – at a time when the oldest members of ‘Gen Z’ (born in 1997) were only 14 years old. Obviously, they weren’t responsible for the shifts in media outputs. They weren’t working as journalists in top media outlets. Nor were they in editorial roles deciding what gets published or not. Nor were they the primary audience that media companies and their advertisers were trying to reach (and tailor coverage around).
Likewise, these teenagers through pre-tweens (at the time) couldn’t have possibly been responsible for the contemporaneous and dramatic shifts academic research that began around 2011. People generally don’t even begin publishing in academic journals until at least their mid-20s (while enrolled in PhD programs). And more senior scholars (i.e. people in their 40s and 50s) are typically the ones who determine what gets published (via their gatekeeping roles as peer reviewers and editors). The shifts in academic research, in other words, were produced mainly by folks in their 30s and up.
The college protests that began in 2011 could not be plausibly attributed to Gen Z either as, again, the oldest folks in this cohort were only 14 at the time. They were neither attending college as students nor egging protestors on as professors.
Critically, it wasn’t just on campuses that protests erupted that year and in the decade that followed. 2011 saw the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Studies of Occupy Wall Street protests found that more than 65 percent of participants were over 30 years old (in 2011. They’d be over 40 today). Subsequent studies looking at the #Resistance marches (the Women’s March, the March for Science, the March for Racial Justice) post 2015 found that the average adult age of demonstrators was 38-49 – not ‘kids these days’ but mid-career professionals. Not Gen Z but millennials and Gen X.
And just as Gen Z was not responsible for the shifts in academic research and protest activity after 2011, they could not have possibly been responsible for the changes in academic culture and administration either.
The ideas and discourses associated with the post-2011 ‘Great Awokening’ have been circulating for decades, developed largely by mid-career professionals, imposed on institutional policies and educational curricula by bureaucrats and implemented by teachers from K-12 through college. None of these were, themselves, Gen Z, but they pushed these ideas on Gen Z during some of their most formative years, largely to their detriment, to the extent that young people internalized these messages at all
The rules put in place micromanaging student interactions or encouraging students to report their peers and professors for any perceived offense were likewise developed and imposed by full-grown adults — mid-career and senior professionals. Many of these policies were put in place before Gen Z began stepping foot on college campuses, and well-before they began to comprise a majority of undergrad students (a shift which occurred circa 2017).
Nor was Gen Z responsible for most decisions over the last decade to terminate employees with little-to-no due process based on social media outrage and unsubstantiated accusations, or for defying prevailing orthodoxies or committing unintentional social faux paus. Although young people often participated in social media outrage campaigns in response to these incidents, it’s senior management that ultimately made the decision to let people go. And financial considerations are typically a far more central factor in decisions to fire or censor people in the wake of online outrage than concerns about what young people think or say. In any case, the focus on ‘kids these days’ obscures where institutional power really lies, and who is actually responsible for the firings that occurred.
Similar realities hold for trends in censorship and self-censorship in science. As colleagues and I illustrate in a new Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study, censorship seems to have grown worse in recent years. However, it’s often driven by scientists themselves rather than students, administrators or outside agitators.
Sometimes scientists censor one-another in the context of power struggles or for other unsavory reasons. More typically, however, prosocial motives seem to be at play.
Many academics self-censor to protect themselves – not just because they’re concerned about preserving their jobs, but also out of a desire to be liked, accepted and included within their disciplines and institutions, or because they don’t wish to create problems for their advisees (at the hands of intolerant professors and other gatekeepers).
Other times, scholars attempt to suppress findings by themselves or others because they view them as incorrect, misleading or potentially dangerous. Sometimes scientists try to squash public dissent of contentious issues for fear that it undermines public trust or scientific authority or provides ammunition for perceived bad actors.
As mid-career professionals grew more focused on social justice after 2011 – as reflected in their shifting attitudes in polls and surveys, their increased participation in protests, the changing rules and norms they put into place in knowledge economy institutions, and the changing themes of knowledge economy outputs – they likely also grew more likely to censor and self-censor in pursuit of these prosocial ends.
This reality has been obscured, in part, because professors often use students as foot soldiers in their censorious campaigns – for instance, by trying to cultivate and encourage student complaints against colleagues they hoped to purge, or by firing up and mobilizing students to demonstrate in the service of their pet causes.
According to data by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, roughly 45 percent of attempts to punish scholars for their teaching, research or speech are driven by graduate or undergraduate students – often egged on by professors or others. Most (55 percent) of the time faculty face disciplinary action, the campaigns are led by colleagues, administrators or outside actors, not ‘kids these days.’ And other forms of censorship (such as politically biased publication and institutional review board decisions) are driven almost exclusively by academic peers.
High-profile cancellation attempts driven by ‘kids these days’ get a lot of headlines, but most censorship is much more discreet and driven largely by scholars themselves.
Again, it might be true that Gen Z has idiosyncratic beliefs about free speech and related topics. But that’s not why knowledge economy institutions are so messed up. They were on a negative trajectory before Gen Z arrived on the scene. And actually, according to many metrics, things seem to be turning a corner now, even as Gen Z are entering these institutions in ever-growing numbers. The kids are alright. It’s the adults you have to worry about.